Martinez's squad reached the prison perimeter late at night.
They parked the truck far away on the other side of the woods, then crossed through the hills on foot, moving without a sound.
By then, most of the prison had sunk into darkness. Only a few faint points of light remained around the guard posts.
"Martinez, do we blow the main gate, or look for a weak spot?" Crowley asked in a low voice.
Martinez slowly swept his binoculars across the area, observing carefully.
His gaze passed over the main building, the watchtowers, the yard… and finally stopped on the northwest corner.
The growls and snarls of the walkers there seemed especially dense. Even from a distance, they could hear them faintly.
On top of that, the wall in that area looked older, and the barbed wire outside it showed several signs of repair.
"Let's check over there," Martinez ordered.
The closer they got to the northwest corner, the clearer the stench and low growls of the walkers became.
They crouched behind a patch of shrubs and were surprised to find that there were far more walkers outside this part of the wall than anywhere else. They had nearly formed a small horde, clawing uselessly at the wall and barbed wire.
"Holy shit! Why are there so many walkers here?" Warren muttered.
Martinez did not answer. His eyes carefully scanned the inside of the wall.
Then he saw a small figure sneaking through the darkness toward the wall.
She crouched behind the barbed wire, apparently holding something in her hand and pushing it outside.
The walkers outside instantly erupted, snarling as they reached through toward her.
It was a child. She was feeding the walkers!
Martinez's heart gave a hard jump.
This was a godsend.
"See that little brat?" he whispered. "She's helping us."
Inside the wall, Lizzie finished feeding them once, then looked at the walkers still snarling toward her with a conflicted expression. "All right, looks like you're still hungry. I'll go find another one!"
Then she quietly slipped away.
"Blow it here?" A fierce look flashed in Crowley's eyes.
"Yeah," Martinez decided at once. "There are enough walkers, and the wall looks old. The blast should tear open the barbed wire and bring down part of the wall. Once it goes off, we retreat into those woods."
Tim shakily took a grenade from his pack. It was something Woodbury had scavenged from a nearby police station.
Crowley, the most agile among them, took the grenade and crawled forward along the ground like a lizard. Using the walkers' noise and the darkness for cover, he stopped more than thirty meters from the wall and waited for Martinez's order.
Time ticked by.
Lizzie appeared again. She had somehow caught another thin sparrow and skillfully returned to her usual spot, ready to repeat her daily "chore."
Martinez saw her. He looked at Crowley and waved hard.
Crowley gave a savage grin, pulled the pin from the grenade, and hurled it with all his strength before quickly retreating into the woods.
"BOOM—!"
A huge explosion suddenly tore through the night.
Flames shot into the sky. Broken chunks of concrete, twisted barbed wire, dirt, steel pellets, and nails blasted outward in a fan shape, spraying violently both into and outside the prison.
A five- or six-meter stretch of the northwest wall collapsed with a thunderous crash, leaving behind a huge, jagged breach.
The walker horde outside the wall was first knocked down by the blast wave. But in the next moment, Lizzie's living scent drifting through the breach, along with the deafening noise, drove them completely mad.
Dozens of walkers snarled as they trampled over the remains of their own kind and the rubble, surging into the prison.
The first victim was Lizzie.
She stood less than five meters from the breach, still clutching the dying sparrow in her hand.
The blast wave knocked her to the ground, leaving her ears ringing and her vision spinning.
Lizzie had not even understood what had happened. All she saw was smoke, dust, and firelight filling the air.
Then the "friends" she had carefully fed every day rushed at her with rotting mouths wide open, each of them fighting to be first.
The girl's terrified scream lasted only half a second before it was swallowed by the sound of flesh being torn apart and the walkers' satisfied gurgling.
"Explosion at the northwest corner! Walkers are pouring in!" the night guard on the watchtower shouted himself hoarse while sounding the prison alarm.
Rick, T-Dog, Andrea, Carol, Jacqui, Tyreese, Sasha, Boone, and the others practically sprang out of their cells, grabbed their weapons, and rushed toward the explosion.
Everything fell into chaos.
More than thirty walkers had poured in, and more were still trying to squeeze through the breach.
They scattered, staggering deeper into the prison.
Gunfire cracked out at once in rapid bursts.
Rick charged at the front, firing precise shots with his handgun. T-Dog and Tyreese, armed with a machete and a hammer, roared as they rushed into the horde for close combat.
Andrea and the others quickly formed a defensive line, trying to contain the walkers in the northwest corner while sending people to block the breach.
"Carl! Take the others to Cell Block C and seal the inner gate! Carol, protect the elderly and the children!" Rick shouted as he fired.
Martinez's squad watched it all coldly from the woods.
"They reacted pretty fast," Eisenberg said.
Martinez said nothing. His gaze swept over the forest outside the wall. The goal of this attack had already been achieved. Now it was time to withdraw.
"We're leaving. Fall back along the original route!" he ordered.
But just as they stood and prepared to retreat deeper into the woods, two gunshots rang out from the direction of the prison.
"Bang! Bang!"
Bullets hissed through the air and struck the tree trunks near their hiding place, sending splinters flying.
"Damn! We've been spotted!" Warren cursed.
It was Carl.
He had not fully obeyed his father's order to hide in the safe zone. Instead, he had climbed the eastern watchtower and, using the handgun Rick had given him, sharply noticed dark figures moving on the distant hillside.
Carl did not hesitate. He opened fire.
The distance made it hard to hit anything, but he successfully exposed the attackers' position.
"Over there! There are people in the woods!" Carl shouted, pointing toward the trees.
Rick understood immediately.
This was not an accident. It was an attack. Someone had blown open the wall.
"Andrea, T-Dog, with me! Everyone else, hold the breach and clear out the walkers!"
Rick's eyes went red in an instant. Someone had taken advantage of their weakness and hurt the people in the prison. He would not let them get away.
The three of them quickly avoided the walkers and charged in the direction Carl had pointed out.
Martinez's squad had not expected the prison's counterattack to come so quickly and so fiercely, much less for them to chase outside the wall.
They immediately sped up their retreat, sprinting through the woods.
Gunshots rang out in broken bursts. Both sides fired while moving, and their accuracy was poor, but stray bullets flew everywhere, making it extremely dangerous.
"Split up! Draw them off!" Martinez roared, veering sharply left with Crowley into a dense patch of underbrush.
"Pffft!"
Tim was panicking and a little slower than the others. Andrea, chasing from behind, shot him in the thigh. He screamed and collapsed to the ground.
He tried to raise his gun and fire back, but T-Dog rushed up and slashed him across the neck. Blood sprayed out, and Tim died on the spot.
Rick told Andrea and T-Dog to keep pursuing together, while he immediately went after Eisenberg, who had run to the right.
Eisenberg heard the relentless footsteps behind him and panicked. His foot slipped, and he fell awkwardly at the edge of a pile of rocks.
He scrambled and crawled behind a rock about half a person tall, panting heavily as his trembling hands loaded a fresh magazine into his pistol.
Rick closed in, slid sideways, and raised his gun. The dark muzzle locked firmly onto the piece of clothing exposed at the side of the rock.
Rick's finger tightened on the trigger. He would fire in the next second.
At that instant, Eisenberg, probably realizing there was nowhere left to hide, suddenly leaned half his body out from behind the rock in a desperate attempt to make one last shot.
The mottled moonlight filtering through the trees happened to fall across the side of his face.
Rick saw that face, tense and terrified.
But those eyes and brows were… Shane?
For a split second, his mind froze, and he did not pull the trigger right away.
...
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